Edinburgh Fringe theatre reviews: Famehungry | Rita Lynn: Life Coach | I'd Like a Job Please + more

THEATRE

FAMEHUNGRY ★★★★

Summerhall (Venue 26) until 26 August

Fringe plays about social media aren’t new, but it’s a subject which society urgently needs to keep refining and rediscovering its relationship with. In fact as events continue to show, for a great many people social media is something which happens to them, even as they kid themselves it’s something they’re doing.

Older Facebook and Twitter users may require an updated refresher course on the relatively new paradigm that is TikTok, a platform designed to be experienced as a constant flow of algorithm-curated visual information, most of which is created by fellow users. The rewards for broadcasting on it ‘correctly’ can be great – financially, and in terms of the attention and validated self-worth which it’s easy to believe most TikTok posters are looking for.

This is where performance artist Louise Orwin comes in, with a hugely ambitious multimedia show which takes place as an internal monologue to the audience through supertitled captions, even as she broadcasts on TikTok Live for an hour. Made-up and pouting into her live-streaming phone camera, she makes coquettish coos and “hey guys!” welcoming noises while waiting for her streaming count to build. These are read off an autocue, she later informs us, because she’s learned that TikTok’s algorithm will automatically ‘shadowban’ any content it views as suspicious.

Orwin dances, runs on a treadmill, scoffs rainbow laces to a pounding, clubby beat and details the strange content which TikTokers make lives out of uploading, from MacDonald’s drive-thru cosplay to a young dancer working on a Chinese production line. She breaks off to chat to real-life TikToker Jax Valentine, who was 15 when Orwin met her at a drama workshop she was leading and is 20 now. Valentine has 80,000 TikTok followers, the equivalent of four O2 Arenas.

Together, they ponder the worth of each of their performances as art. All at once it’s light and amusing, but also sinister and dystopian, a portrait of humanity as it desperately tries to wring love and affirmation from the machine.

David Pollock

THEATRE

Rita Lynn: Life Coach ★★★

Pleasance Dome (Venue 23) until 25 August

In 2018, actor Louise Marwood left ITV’s Emmerdale after spending four years playing a starring role in the soap – and spiralled into addiction. This semi-autobiographical one-woman play is inspired by her experiences. It is a humorous and headlong piece of work, featuring a terrific performance from Marwood – but it is also underdeveloped.

Marwood is Imogen Wood, a forty-something whose dreams of becoming a professional dancer never materialised. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a damaging relationship, drinking too much, and snorting lines of cocaine from morning to night. Then, she somehow stumbles into a £250-an-hour job offering advice to the super-rich, masquerading as a life-coach called Rita Lynn – Ritalin, get it?

Marwood’s writing is darkly funny – “My suicide note was so good, it made me want to live,” her character quips – and she provides a powerful performance. Under Nick Bagnall’s direction, she staggers around the bare stage, sniffing coke off every available surface and chatting at a million miles an hour, flicking between characters as she goes.

The problem is that her play does not really go anywhere. Imogen ping-pongs between her partner, her pal, her accidental profession, and a self-help group for addicts, then the show just stops. There is no climax, no resolution, no meaning, nothing. Marwood has written a remarkable character. She just needs to find her an ending.

Fergus Morgan

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THEATRE

I'd Like a Job Please ★★★

Paradise in The Vault (Venue 29) until 10 August

This jam-packed show encapsulates the whirlwind of trying to find a job during your early 20s. It centres on recent graduate Sarah Snelson (Lilia Murdoch Vilaplana) who appears to be the only sane person in a crazy world filled with condescending career advisors, lying wellness gurus and out of touch friends.

In a series of connected mini scenes, many comical moments arise from the exaggerated stereotype characters as Sarah tries desperately to secure any sort of work. Lucy Walder as career advisor Tracey, with her patronizing head nods and subtle belittling, is particularly funny and Sam Rees’s all-too-familiar misogynistic podcast host Jamie MacBlane, is dry and perfectly pitched. Every character is as unhelpful as the next, creating a comedy that will painfully resonate with anyone who has ever struggled to find a job.

The short scenes require a lot of quick set and character changes, all of which are choreographed cleanly and carried out well by the dedicated cast. However, some humorous and tender moments get lost in the effort to follow so many characters at once. It errs on the side of being too wild and unruly towards the end but does well to remain enjoyable.

Suzanne O'Brien

THEATRE

Mum and I Don’t Talk Anymore by Milanka Brooks ★★★

Assembly George Square (Venue 8) until 25 August

This is an entertaining hour in the company of former model-turned-momzilla Lela and a wry and occasionally sobering one in the company of her daughter, actress Milanka Brooks, who embodies her Bosnian Serb mother in all her glamorous, flirtatious folly.

We hear that in her time Lela was a chambermaid, nightclub dancer and model, though her most satisfying role appeared to be as the wife of a handsome bounder and object of admiration to the male of the species. She was (almost) always in control of the agenda however and believed that there was nothing that could not be fixed with a shot of Serbian plum brandy – apart from her stubborn daughter’s love life.

Brooks balances her affectionate, amusing portrayal of this larger-than-life character and their cross-generational differences with the real-life challenges of dealing with her cavalier parents, dark circumstances which often left Brooks as the default grown-up in the room.

Her role as the responsible adult comes to a head with a life-or-death decision. Even in this position of miserable power, Brooks can still mine some humour but her sincere closing musings on grief stray close to platitudes.

Fiona Shepherd

THEATRE

Ascension ★★★

Bedlam Theatre (Venue 49) until 26 August

In 1723, 30-year-old Leendert Hasenbosch was put ashore on remote Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, and left to survive – or perish – alone. His crime was sodomy.

Dan Hazelwood’s intimate drama revisits the diary that Hasenbroch remarkably kept during his months on the island, mixing accounts of the hardships he endured – a lack of such fundamentals as food, drink and shelter – with memories of the clandestine encounters that had led to his cruel punishment, and his enduring feelings for another man in a similar position to his own.

It's a fascinating, compelling story, one that Hazelwood has himself adapted into a convincing piece of drama – even if a few (intentional) anachronisms threaten to sap its focus and power (and even if its conclusion seems inevitable from the start). He’s a persuasive presence in the central role, too, even if he’s perhaps a little too hearty as Hasenbroch’s strength and will begin to fade. Conor Mainwaring is strong and agile as Hasenbroch’s on-off lover, offering a perspective on gay relations far more of our own times that sets the piece’s 300-year-old conceptions of morality and heavenly disapproval in stark relief. Hazelwood’s closing interrogation of just whose story this is to tell, though, takes the show to another level of insight.

David Kettle